language learning sideblog

23 。 she/they 。 main: krownest 。 happy learning!

[tengu-feathers]

welcome to my language studyblr :)

about me:

teng, 26

i'm from: toronto, canada 🇨🇦 | hong kong 🇭🇰

i'm fluent in english, can speak cantonese and mandarin/putonghua (badly...), learning french (conversational level), beginner in japanese

language learning motivation:

🇫🇷: official languages of canada are eng and français so i feel obliged to learn + it's a career advantage (lame ik)

🇭🇰: literally my mother tongue but i don't consume enough cantonese media so i have a definite accent :(

🇨🇳: i'm chinese so i like. i feel obliged to be able to speak/read/write it at native level

🇯🇵: i would like to travel to japan + there is so much amazing japanese media + learning it is a good break from french and chinese + i already know kanji so that's 1/3 of the work done (kind of lol)

language goals:

🇫🇷: Test de connaissance du français (TCF) - C1

🇭🇰: 漢語水平考試 (HSK/Chinese Proficiency Test) - Level 7-9

🇨🇳: 普通話水平測試 (Putonghua Proficiency Test) - 1B

🇯🇵: 日本語能力試験 (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test) - N2

blog content:

progress entries about my learning

posts about french/japanese/chinese media i'm reading/watching

study tips

Let me know if you're also studying french/chinese/japanese! I'm looking for fellow language learning mutuals :)

[pompadourpink]

100 animals in French

Ant – fourmi (la fourmi porte une feuille)

Auk - pingouin (le pingouin court sur la banquise)

Badger – blaireau (le blaireau creuse un terrier)

Bat – chauve-souris (la chauve-souris dort dans une cave)

Bear – ours/ourse (l'ourse protège ses petits)

Beaver – castor (le castor construit un barrage)

Bee – abeille (l'abeille butine les fleurs)

Boar – sanglier (le sanglier fouille la forêt)

Bull – taureau (le taureau est dans le pré)

Butterfly – papillon (le papillon vole dans le jardin)

Canary – canari (le canari chante dans sa cage)

Cat – chat/chatte (le chat est dans la maison)

Chicken – poule (la poule pond des œufs)

Cow – vache (la vache broute dans le champ)

Crow – corneille (la corneille croasse sur le toit)

Cuckoo – coucou (le coucou chante au printemps)

Deer – cerf (le cerf brame dans les bois)

Doe - biche (la biche s'élance dans les buissons)

Dog – chien/chienne (le chien aboie dans le jardin)

Dolphin – dauphin (le dauphin saute hors de l'eau)

Donkey – âne/ânesse (l'âne brait dans l'écurie)

Dove – colombe (la colombe est un symbole de paix)

Duck – canard/cane (le canard nage dans l'étang)

Eagle – aigle (l'aigle plane dans le ciel)

Ewe - brebis (la brebis est endormie dans l'herbe)

Falcon – faucon (le faucon chasse en plein vol)

Ferret – furet/furette (le furet est un animal curieux)

Finch – pinson (le pinson chante dans les arbres)

Firefly - luciole (la luciole fait de la lumière)

Fish - poisson (le poisson a des écailles rouges)

Fly - mouche (la mouche tourne en rond)

Fox – renard/renarde (le renard est rusé)

Frog – grenouille (la grenouille saute dans l'étang)

Goat – chèvre (la chèvre grimpe sur la colline)

Goose – oie (l'oie glousse dans la cour)

Grasshopper – sauterelle (la sauterelle saute dans le champ)

Guinea pig - cochon d'Inde (le cochon d'Inde fait du bruit)

Hamster – hamster (le hamster court dans sa roue)

Hare – lièvre (le lièvre court dans les champs)

Hedgehog – hérisson (le hérisson se roule en boule)

Heron – héron (le héron pêche dans l'eau peu profonde)

Horse – cheval/jument (le cheval galope dans le pré)

Hummingbird - colibri (le colibri a de jolies couleurs)

Jay – geai (le geai imite les sons des autres oiseaux)

Kestrel – crécerelle (la crécerelle plane au-dessus des champs)

Kingfisher – martin-pêcheur (le martin-pêcheur plonge dans l'eau)

Lark – alouette (l'alouette chante au lever du soleil)

Lizard – lézard (le lézard se prélasse au soleil)

Lynx – lynx (le lynx guette sa proie)

Magpie – pie (la pie vole des objets brillants)

Mallard – canard colvert (le canard colvert nage sur l'étang)

Mole – taupe (la taupe creuse des tunnels sous le jardin)

Moth – papillon de nuit (le papillon de nuit vole la nuit)

Mouse – souris (la souris grignote du fromage)

Mule – mulet (le mulet porte la charge)

Nightingale – rossignol (le rossignol chante la nuit)

Octopus – poulpe (le poulpe change de couleur)

Owl – hibou, chouette (le hibou hulule dans la forêt)

Parrot – perroquet (le perroquet répète les mots)

Partridge – perdrix (la perdrix se cache dans les sous-bois)

Peacock – paon (le paon déploie ses plumes)

Pelican – pélican (le pélican a un grand bec)

Penguin – manchot (le manchot glisse sur la glace)

Pheasant – faisan (le faisan court dans les champs)

Pig – cochon (le cochon se roule dans la boue)

Pigeon – pigeon (le pigeon se pose à la fenêtre)

Pike – brochet (le brochet chasse les petits poissons)

Porcupine – porc-épic (le porc-épic fait la sieste)

Quail – caille (la caille se cache dans les bois)

Rabbit – lapin, lapine (le lapin mange des carottes)

Raccoon – raton laveur (le raton laveur fouille les poubelles)

Rat – rat (le rat court dans les égouts)

Raven – corbeau (le corbeau est intelligent)

Red deer – cerf (le cerf se bat avec ses bois)

Robin – rouge-gorge (le rouge-gorge chante sur la clôture)

Roe deer – chevreuil (le chevreuil saute dans les bois)

Rooster – coq (le coq chante au lever du jour)

Salmon – saumon (le saumon remonte la rivière)

Scorpion – scorpion (le scorpion se cache sous les rochers)

Seal – phoque (le phoque se repose sur les rochers)

Shark – requin (le requin nage dans l'océan)

Sheep – mouton (le mouton broute l'herbe)

Snail - escargot (l'escargot bave sur le parquet)

Snake – serpent (le serpent glisse dans le sable)

Sparrow – moineau (le moineau picore les miettes)

Spider – araignée (l'araignée tisse sa toile)

Squirrel – écureuil (l'écureuil grignote des noisettes)

Stork – cigogne (la cigogne construit son nid sur le toit)

Swallow – hirondelle (l'hirondelle revient chaque printemps)

Swan – cygne (le cygne glisse sur le lac)

Toad – crapaud (le crapaud se cache sous les pierres)

Trout – truite (la truite nage dans la rivière)

Turkey – dinde (la dinde est souvent servie à Noël)

Turtle – tortue (la tortue se déplace lentement)

Vulture – vautour (le vautour est un charognard)

Weasel – belette (la belette est un petit prédateur)

Whale – baleine (la baleine est le plus grand animal du monde)

Wolf – loup/louve (le loup hurle au clair de lune)

Woodpecker – pic-vert (le pic-vert tape sur l'arbre)

Worm – ver (le ver de terre est bon pour le sol)

Fanmail - masterlist (2016-) - archives - hire me - reviews (2020-) - Drive

[moonshinemagpie]

i can't believe i didn't watch comprehensible input/listening videos on YouTube for 95% of my Japanese studies. Not sure if they didn't exist back then or if my algorithm just didn't recommend them until recently. But they're such a rich resource.

If you're learning Japanese and want stuff to listen to and shadow with, here are some recs:

This guy ^ has 80 videos of N4 listening practice on Patreon. They're $80 until April 9, and if you're around N4 and can afford it, it looks worth it imo. I just got it for my student to practice.

So many of the videos are travel vlogs or discussions about Japanese culture and language. They help you learn while also preparing you to enjoy a trip or move to Japan.

Hugely helpful!

[unearthitaly]

I very much agree with these suggestions. Forcing myself to write was the way I could finally start to become an active rather than a passive user of the target language.

[logically-asexual]

i love learning a language and recognizing some patterns when listening or reading even though i don’t fully understand most of it. it feels

it feels like having a crush. like i have a parasocial relationship to the language. like. i consider it my friend and feel familiar to it even though i don’t really know it as well as people who actually speak it on their daily lives but i still admire it from afar.

[languagelvlup]

Was just talking to my friend the other day, the one who started studying Japanese for her trip to japan in November

Despite never studying before, she found she already knew a LOT from anime. she knew how to say “happy birthday” and “it’s hot” and “it’s cold” and “that’s amazing” and “ahh, I see”

On the other hand, her partner…didn’t. Even though he also watched a lot of anime, he didn’t remember as many of the words or phrases

I asked why she thought that might be. She said she wasn’t sure, since she didn’t actively study.

She said “I mean, I like to repeat what the characters say sometimes” and I said “oh, we call that shadowing.” She said “I like to look up the song lyrics and then check what the words mean in English, just for fun.” I said “nice. sounds like vocabulary study.” She said yeah and then me and my friend used to joke around by quoting the shows, like バカ！and ごめん and かわいい and…like, 元気ですか？and, uh, あついですね！and i was like “so…conversation practice”

Don’t get me wrong, maybe some people really do just watch a few TV shows on repeat and the language somehow sticks. But a lot of people who “don’t study” just don’t realize they’re studying, or they naturally did some language acquisition things that you had to actively learn how to do

[mbtriestolearnstuff]

Some language apps that I've tried

Not really a proper review thingy, but more like thoughts upon trying some stuff and deciding to keep some notes to not forget and end up picking stuff I did not like the first time.

All these are my personal opinions on them, so they might not align with yours. 👍🏻

Colour key (?) I made for these notes:

red: I'd avoid this app

yellow: meh, not a fan but there's worse i guess

pink: maybe it's better to try this when you already have some basics of the language, and not from scratch

green: I like this app

blue: not bad, like- good but nothing to write home about

HiLocal Appeared like a nice language learning app, with the chance of some language exchange feel... but as soon as I opened it, it shoved me their AI in the face for learning and it irked me a bit. Deleted account and uninstalled.

LanguageCrush Unless you already have some basics for your target language, it's not a good app for starting out. Better for practicing after having already a decent level of knowledge in a language.

Koryo Korea A pinch of basics are needed for this app. The courses feel a bit clunky and mainly give you some vocabulary and phrases but doesn't feel like it's helping learning. Better for memorising, maybe.

Teuida A good app. The lessons start from the basics and the video lessons where they simulate a real life situation where you'd use the words and sentences you have learnt. Mainly voice/audio focused, so it kinda helps with figuring out the pronounciation... even though the voice recognition sometimes doesn't really work, and makes you repeat something until the mic catches it.

Busuu I'd say it's better than Duolingo before it become ai-powered shit. The free version letsyou follow the main course for a language and only a few things are behind the paywall. There are ads, yes, but it's only promoting their paid version and usually only before and/or after doing one of the lessons. There's a little community-like thing where you can correct other peoples' exercises and viceversa.

HiNative Similar name to HiLocal but afaik it's a different thing. It looked kinda nice because you could ask questions/clarifications to people who know your target langued natively, but I uninstalled it quickly because unless you have already some basics it's not easy to start from scratch with this app.

HelloTalk I wanted to try a "language exchange" app that wasn't Tandem (it wasn't that great years ago and I heard that now it became worse) and I picked this one. I feel like if you're fem/register as fem you might have more chances of finding someone to chat bc many use these kinds of apps as dating-app-lookalike, but I tried registering an account under my deadname and I still had no interactions LMAO Feels more like a social network than a language app. There are some stuff in-app for learning, but I didn't really enjoy them when I tried them. There are voice chats (didn't do much other then lurking in one for a bit, so I have no opinion on those) and you at least can avoid interacting with the damn ai, because apparently they are everywhere now.

TalkIn Another language exchange app. Picked this because it had many stars on the app store, but weirdly no reviews written (maybe deleted? idk but it wasn't the first app with this issue). You can sign in with FB, Google acc, phone and mail. I tried the registration by mail because I didn't want to connect my google account, but then got an error message kept popping up. I uninstalled and left a negative review addressing this issue. The developer said they disabled email regisation to avoid bulk registrations and people bothering the community already in there... while this is understandable, I do not like an app who forces me to connect my personal account to register. And if you remove the option for mail registration, you should remove the option from the main page, duh.

Learn Korean! Hangul Okay. Nothing much to say about this, it's good for learning/reviewing how to write the korean alphabet. It's a bit picky with how you write the strokes for the letters.

QLango Appeared like a valid option, but I noticed that the difficulty of the various levels (A1 to B2) didn't feel regular as they should be. In a Korean A1 course there were more things you'd have to already know before starting out, while the French B2 was easier (imho, I have only B1 level and haven't practiced French in like a dozen years) than it should have been. And there's ai here, too. You can spot it only when completing an exercise (in the pop up that appears there's a "ask the ai" thing) or opening the sidebar menu with the buttong to go ask DeepSeek questions. Deleted account and uninstalled.

[unusual]

Japanese is an incredibly fun and rewarding language (if you’ve ever wanted to learn it for ANY reason, most importantly including the “silly” reasons) but the fearmongering and capitalist intervention involved in the language learning process have given it a reputation as an “impossible task” for English speakers, leading to confusion and dkn learners and weird pessimist attitudes about the whole thing. In this thread I will explain how to effectively learn and retain Japanese. This is a tried, tested and true method; probably 99% of all people who try to learn Japanese give up, but everyone I’ve met who has tried and stuck with this has been at or above N3-N4 after 6 months or less including me

[unusual]

You can teach yourself Japanese for free if you have a little free time every day and a computer

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Remember to consult yomitan and cure dolly where needed, that’s what it’s there for. As you can see I am quite normal about the Japanese language, so if you have any other questions or need help with anything else feel free to shoot me an ask and I will get back to you promptly. Japanese is not your enemy and it is not impossible. It is your friend

[undasura]

Where did you start when learning japanese?

i started using duolingo when i was around 16 (way before they started using genAI for lessons) and then fell off around the time i started gettin sickly ... but i retained enough to read hiragana and katakana even if i dont know like. the words im reading very well usually lol. i also have heard good things about renshuu (app) but i keep forgetting to use it...!

i also like tofugu (website). they also have a cool page on queer terms/slang which i enjoyed reading through

[undasura]

oooo thank you!!! hopefully this will be helpful for the anon as it was for me hehe

[rigelmejo]

I'm a broken record about this, but I really recommend reading Heavenly Path's Comrpehensive Reading Guide, and then checking out their webnovel recommendations for Newcomers.

Even if you only take some tips away from that guide, something in it will be of some use to you. Their guide mentions Pleco, Readibu, a ton of free Graded Reader resources, when to start trying to read stories. Just tons of useful stuff.

For people who are already reading, and struggling to find easier, or slightly more challening, reading material, their general recommendations pages are extremely useful.

[corvid-language-library]

Learned the word 三日坊主（みっかぼうず）today, which basically means someone who starts something but quits quickly, eg they say they're gonna write a novel, get the first two pages written in a day, spend the next day staring at their Scrivener document, and then never touch it again. 坊主 = Buddhist priest, 三日 = 3 days. "3-day priest." Pretty sure we've all been there are some point in our lives 😅

[mountaindook]

Hii!! I’ve really been enjoying Japan vlogs lately and have been looking to improve my Japanese studying (if you can call it that…I’ve been slacking) and I’m going to try the immersive method, as it’s unintentionally helped me before and sounded a lot like my learning style.

I was hoping people could recommend channels with Japanese audio (commentary) but English subtitles! I think it could help me out!! (starting w subtitles before moving to without!) Other recommendations or advice is welcome!!

[moonshinemagpie]

If you're learning Japanese, please consider using Polygloss!

Polygloss is an app that lets you practice writing in your target language every day. You play a game where you can see 4 different pictures, like this:

And you choose one of the pictures to describe and write a hint. Your hint gets sent to another user along with the same set of pictures, and the user will guess which of the 4 you were describing.

There seem to be few users learning Japanese on the app, so I play with the same people basically every day. Please join us!!

[is-this-taken-too-questionmark]

I think that the best part about learning a new language is that it effectively doubles your ability to Just Do Whatever. You can buy a book that looks interesting but isn't available in your native language. You can research your favourite topics and have twice the amount of resources as before. You can make new friends. You can laugh at puns that are impossible to translate into any other language. You can ask for help, negotiate, bargain for stuff, stay informed. You can listen to new music and read new poems and be in awe of not just the sound, but the meaning of the words as well. So many new opportunities for you to find joy and be free to do whatever you want!!!

[warau-okami]

Japanese Quick Reference Guide

When I moved to Japan in 2013 I spent the first six months taking intensive Japanese classes at a language school in Tokyo. During that time I got frustrated with the quality of the teaching materi…

Hiragana and Katakana

Numbers & Times / Dates

Counters & Pointers

Expressions of Time

People & Family

Useful Verbs

Useful Adjectives

Conjugation Basics

Common Verb Conjugations

Useful Adverbs

Useful Nouns

Common Particles

Sentence Recipes

The guide roughly covers the content of the first ‘Minna no Nihongo‘ textbook and is intended as a supplement for classroom study, not as a replacement – it does not include copious examples or explanations.

Click through to download

[russenoire]

some cool posts i found today!

Knock on Wood: Kanji with the Tree Radical (木)

Japanese kanji with the tree radical, written as 木, tend to focus on characters with a strong semantic connection to trees and wood.

y'all may be familiar with general macarthur's push to abolish kanji in written japanese during the US occupation after WW2, but tussles here and there about the role of kanji among japanese scholars and politicians have been ongoing since at least the meiji period:

Character Assassination: Successes and Failures of Kanji Reform

Reformers and Abolitionists In 1866, as the Edo period drew to a close, the statesman Maejima Hisoka submitte…

[languagelvlup]

Question for my fellow language-learners. When did consuming media in your target language stop feeling like "studying"?

[nihongoseito]

i reblogged this a few weeks ago but i think i've refined my thoughts on it since.

when i saw this i automatically thought, novels and tv are still studying to me, bc they're way harder than manga. but i actually think i wasn't giving myself enough credit.

i'm the kind of person who generally wants to stop to look up vocab i don't recognize (though there are times when i decide not to), so novels especially can be really slow going. but as i'm sure you'll agree if you give it two more seconds' thought than i did (lol), the amount of new vocab is almost wholly dependent on the thing you're engaging with, not its category....like for example, when i read the manga 雪と墨, i looked up SILLY amounts of vocab because the series escalated into this incredibly complicated ECONOMIC drama, and suddenly i needed to know how to say financial terms i didn't even understand in english. (needless to say i've forgotten all of it lol.) that was manga, but it was still really intensive.

but, did that feel like studying, per se...? honestly, no. looking up new vocab doesn't feel like studying to me, or at least not anymore. the more i thought about it, the more i realized that for me, the only honest to god "studying" i do in japanese anymore is wanikani (when i'm keeping up with it oops). i think if i decided i wanted to take n1, then i would be doing some true blue "studying" again, but nowadays i think i'm kind of....done studying. certainly i'm not done learning, but i somehow feel it's different from back when i called my learning "studying". is that crazy to say as someone who runs a japanese langblr?? that i don't "study" japanese anymore???

something that i've noticed recently as i begin to read more japanese novels (and 二次創作) for fun is that i have become really good at identifying where/how to get explanations for things i don't understand. using japanese to ask questions about japanese gets you super specific and useful answers, but even more than that, i surprise myself with how easy it is to recognize idioms, expressions, and special kanji without knowing what they mean. i think that means i've passed some threshold for knowing common words and word combinations--meaning, if a verb phrase seems completely out of nowhere, with both a verb AND a noun i don't know or a regular noun paired with a totally opaque verb, my first assumption is that it's a full expression i just haven't seen before. and usually, that's right. so if i wanted to buckle down and STUDY, i'd probably get a lot of mileage out of studying ことわざ and 四字熟語 and similar. but honestly....i don't really want to do that....where i'm at right now, i think it's enough for me to be encountering these things naturally as i read.

as for tv and podcasts, i hardly watch or listen to any, in any language....so maybe those really would still feel like studying! but i wonder if maybe not, for the same reason--i feel like i'd mostly be looking up vocab.

so, what is my actual answer to op's question...."when" did this happen to me?? well, within the last two or so years, i think. i started studying japanese in 2012, but i was self-taught until 2018, at which point i started learning a LOT and REALLY fast, so that was a big jump. but i think this most recent jump in my ability, since 2022 or so, has been the tipping point away from studying for me, because that was when i started volunteering and working in japanese.

i think the lesson here is exposure really does wonders. when japanese became "just another language" i used in my day-to-day, native japanese media started feeling way more approachable, even if it was difficult. i love japanese with all my heart and brain (i'm a linguist lol), but really, there's nothing mystical or unique about it, same as there's nothing mystical or unique about any language. we use it for stuff!! and sometimes what i'm using it for is, reading the new volume of witch hat atelier!!!